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Ingress. Connecticut, Florida, New Mexico,
Nevada, mountains, parks, beaches, hik-
ing, flying, driving. To access more remote
areas in Colorado, she bought an ATV and a
satellite phone. She recently took a jeep up
Horseshoe Mountain to lay claim to a portal,
continuing on foot when the trail narrowed
too much for her vehicle.
Niantic’s AR world expanded this year
with a Harry Potter game. One of Hanke’s
design imperatives is to use more audio, so
that players can gather clues and commu-
nicate as much as possible without having
to stare at a screen. They also work hard to
pace the game for daily life, designing mi-
croadventures that can be completed in five
to ten minutes. Hanke sees more nongam-
ing manifestations in the future, too. “Aug-11.19 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 101
This is the kind of place where coders and
designers are creating the next great software
and hardware that will capture our eyeballs.
One suite of offices here is the unlikely
home to an outpatient service for people in
one of the final phases of ReStart. Opened
at this locale in October 2018, this is Open
World, named for the genre of exploratory
games that bedazzled so many patients in
the first place. The participants have com-
pleted eight to twelve weeks of therapy in the
mountain retreats of Washington and are in
the home stretch of recovery. They share an
apartment nearby while attending frequent
counseling sessions focused on how they’ll
balance their lives, including their technol-
ogy use, in the years to come.
“To be ready for the transition program,”
Cash tells me, “they really have to have a
good life-balance plan and be in a recovery
mindset.”
Near the kitchen, I meet a 21-year-old
named Chris. As he sits on a stool picking at
the last of a sandwich, he tells me about the
vicious circle he experienced as a kid grow-
ing up in Texas.
“My dad was very neglectful. He didn’t
spend much time with me,” he says. “But the
time that we did spend together was play-
ing video games. So that kind of increased
my desire to play, especially when trying to
escape anything I didn’t want to deal with.”
After several months in ReStart, Chris says
he’s finding his way in the world again, and
he’s taken up disc golf and nature walks. “I
love spending time in nature,” he says. “It’s
one of my favorite things to do these days.”
There’s a tendency to think that being
outdoors is inherently better than time
spent in a virtual space. The truth, however,
is increasingly complex. We have become
cyborgs, toggling between the world around
us and the world on our screens. With new
technologies like AR, those worlds will con-
tinue to blur until, at some point, they over-
lap. It won’t be so easy to differentiate, as
we do now, lamenting that we’re spending
too much time staring at our phones when
we should be staring at the sky. And it will
be our increased immersion in virtual worlds
that may heighten something more crucial:
our need for the outdoors. In this sense, the
gamers in ReStart are like visitors from the
future, people who have returned from the
other side of the pixelated glass, blinking
back from their reverie to soak in the life
around them. ODAVID KUSHNER ( @DAVIDKUSHNER)
IS THE AUTHOR OF THE PLAYERS
BALL: A GENIUS, A CON MAN, AND
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE
INTERNET’S RISE.mented reality is bleeding out from games
into physical fitness,” he says.
In other words, AR points to a future in
which we can have the best of both worlds.
We can experience the outdoors in a new way,
with a new lens, exploring places with people
who might not be inclined to go outside and
meeting new friends along the way. As the
technology becomes more seamless, it will
fade, like everything else, into the background
of our lives. The true sign of this integration
will be when we stop talking about this stuff
at all. It’ll just be a part of the experience,
another tool for the road, like a compass.IT’S MIDAFTERNOON at the Bellevue Tech-
nology Center, a collection of bland office
buildings in the heart of Microsoft country.A ReStart
alum on the
main-campus
climbing wall